Thursday, August 21, 2008

Relaxed foreign language education

We've been studying Spanish very informally around here. I have been refreshing my memory - in my pre-mom life, I got a bachelor's degree in Spanish, so it's in there somewhere. The Bookworm King speaks some, but not a lot. But we want to teach this to our kids.

While Rosetta Stone's Latin American Spanish is on our wishlist, it is Price-y. We must save many pennies.

So, in the meantime, we are doing what we can. We have both the English version and Spanish translations of our boys' favorite children's books, like Good Night, Moon and The Runaway Bunny, and we want to get more of them - and we will as time flies by. We also have Flip Flop Spanish 1 and the Twin Sisters Productions Spanish Songs on mp3. And these are delightful. The Spanish Songs have a delightful beat and are actually sung over and over. The Flip Flop lessons are simple and short.

We keep the audio files for the past three Flip Flop lessons and two of the Spanish songs (one new, one review) in the Schoolwork playlist on our iPod (along with the current hymn, folk song, composer sample, and some things like "I'm a Little TeaPot" that my toddler does need to recognize and I forget to sing to him. Since we have to drive about 20 minutes to get anywhere we go, we listen to the playlist once a day. We occasionally review vocabulary: counting goldfish in Spanish, naming colors in the room, etc.

You all, you should have see the shock on my mom's face when (2 year old) #3 ran up to hug her and said, "Hi Gramma! Como estas?"